Valerie Lindner

The Tragic Life of the Girl with the Extraordinary Mind

By Henry H. Lindner, MD (under construction)

She was my best friend, best colleague, best patient, and beloved daughter

She earned B.S. degrees with honors in physics, astronomy/astrophysics, and mathematics; and completed all required courses for her Physics PhD candidacy

Obituary

See her writings on theoretical physics, her infections, attachment disorder, feminism, and other topics below.

I had the incredible privilege of having this brilliant, unique, but tortured human being in my life for 30 years. Through her I learned to see life and humans in a deeper, more objective way.

I marveled at her perseverance in the face of continual mental/emotional suffering and physical deterioration. Despite her lack of hope, she kept fighting to get better to the very end—for her family.

This website contains frank, personal information about mental suffering and attachment disorders.

As Valerie searched the internet to find others who felt as she did, I hope that others will benefit from learning about her life.

PowerPoint Presentation on Her Life

Valerie Lindner: My brief review of her life, illness, and education. I presented it at a memorial gathering hosted by Penn State’s Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos on April 19, 2024.

Academic Achievement despite Chronic Babesiosis

We raised Valerie with attachment parenting, unconditional love and freedom. She grew up pursuing her interests, without schooling of any kind.

When she was 10 years old, she was bitten by two deer ticks. She remembers gradually becoming depressed and unable to draw as she used to.

By age 14 she was fatigued, distraught and suicidal. We enrolled her in college courses for distraction. She excelled in every class.

In 2016, with great effort, she graduated as the top STEM student at Penn State University; her professors loved her because she loved knowledge.

She garnered degrees in physics, astronomy/astrophysics and mathematics, and took graduate courses in all three majors.

Through her studies in physics, she determined that my commonsense approach to philosophy and physics worked.

However, she barely made it through her senior year, and afterwards spent many months in bed.

After taking a year off, she became well enough to start graduate school in physics at Penn State in 2017 but became disabled again under the stress.

We eventually realized that she must have gotten some previously unknown infection from the ticks.

Starting in 2018 antimicrobials, and especially antimalarials made her much more ill (Herxheimer-like reaction). 

Testing eventually revealed that she had chronic Bartonella and Babesia infections—both are parasites that inhabit blood vessels throughout the body and brain.

We eventually realized that the ticks had given her Babesia odocoilei, the most common Babesia species in deer ticks in the US, but hitherto ignored by the “experts”.

It created fibrin-bonded nests that occluded small blood vessels throughout her brain, sapping its energy and disturbing its function. In 2020, her brain PET scan was grossly abnormal.

In late 2020 she improved dramatically on a powerful combination of antimalarial medications, but after that progress was slow.

She required very high steroid doses to tolerate the killing and exposing of parasites in her brain, and they altered her appearance for the worse.

She was able to return to grad school in 2022-2023, but again the stress and emotions worsened her state and caused her to need higher steroid doses for months.

On December 9, 2023, at the age of 30, while working hard to rid her brain of sequestered parasites, she caught a cold and died of hemophagocytic syndrome. 

Attachment Disorder

Her problems began before the tick bites, her life was doubly cursed.

Since her birth, Valerie seemed to be uncomfortable and needed constant distraction. For 3 years she needed rhythmic bouncing in order to fall asleep.

As long as she could remember, she never felt joy, happiness, or love. She never had the good feelings that we all take for granted.

Val and I later theorized that she acquired her Bartonella infection in the uterus at around 10 weeks, at the time of chorionic villus sampling.

The intravascular infection inflamed the emotional centers of her brain—the basal ganglia and limbic system. Her 2020 and 2022 PET-MRI scans revealed hypermetabolism there. 

Since her birth, we could not soothe her mental torment. She never felt our love and so didn’t learn to love herself or humans in general. She developed an attachment disorder.

She compensated by seeking intellectual pleasure—whatever was intelligent, interesting, novel, or beautiful—she became hyperintellectual.

She did not identify as female or even human. She therefore viewed humans and their lives objectively—as if she were an alien visitor to our planet.

The Babesia infection worsened her Bartonella-related basal ganglia encephalitis, thus causing more negative emotions.

In adolescence, she was able to get some good feelings through a libidinous fantasy involving love between androgynous characters—a human and an alien.

She was driven to study the sciences to make her fantasy world as real as possible—because she hated her life in this world.

At age 22, she found a single human, an androgynous male rock star from the 70s, whom she could love. Her life-long dysphoria disappeared and she could experience love—as long as she could indulge in that fantasy.

She also had fantasies of kidnapping, controlling, raping and eating young women and men. She studied and understood serial killers. Part of her wanted to make others suffer as she suffered.

There were two Valeries: She could seem perfectly normal, even super-normal, when suppressing her true feelings, but they surfaced periodically in fits of homicidal and suicidal rage.

In July of 2022, through her own research, she realized that she had an attachment disorder. Psychotherapists could not help her.

She became convinced that she could never find a permanent, real-life solution to her constant emotional turmoil, and therefore needed to die.

(For a more detailed summary of her life, see the PowerPoint below.)

Valerie’s Writings on Physics

  1. Research Ideas for Flowing Space v. Relativity: Like the other writings on physics here, she produced this in 2015, in the spring semester of her junior year at Penn State University. She was preparing to apply to graduate schools and was compelled to write down her ideas for her PhD thesis. She was convinced that the Flowing Space theory of gravity was correct, and that theoretical physics must be reformulated as a theory of the role of physical inertial-gravitational/electromagnetic space in all phenomena. This is the approach to physics that Einstein tried to suppress by restricting physics to observer-based measurement-prediction modeling.
  2. Unanswered Questions in Physics, Relevant Quotes and other Ideas
  3. Thoughts on Electromagnetism
  4. Additional Thoughts on Quantum Mechanics
  5. The GPS System with Flowing Space Corrections: A paper she wrote at my request after a GPS expert claimed that the system would not work as it does if space were flowing radially into the Earth from all directions, as light signals from different satellites would have different spatial paths—particularly when comparing an overhead satellite with one on the horizon. She did the math and found that the “error” due to spatial sink flow was only 2.4 mm, well within the known error. She also proved that Flowing Space reproduced the Shapiro Time Delay.
  6. Online Debates on Relativity vs. Flowing Space
  7. Dark Matter Distribution: A PowerPoint presentation she prepared for an astrophysics course.

On Her Education

  1. Braddock Scholar: Unschooled but not Uneducated: A Penn State Eberle Science Journal article on Valerie’s unschooling and academic achievements.
  2. Interview with Valerie: Her responses were the basis for the above article.

On Her Suffering and Disabilities

1.      Her Anhedonia: This was written in 2017, just after she started he first year at grad school. This is a before we understood that she had infections and an attachment disorder.

2.      Babesia-related Problems at School in her Undergrad Years: Two weeks after starting classes each year she would become fatigued, brain-fogged, and cold, and suffer from extreme hunger

3.      On Her Attachment Disorder and its Effects on her Life: Written in May of 2023, while she was seeing a psychotherapist and had begun to realize that she had an attachment disorder.

4.      Collection of Her Writings about Her Constant Mental Torment

5.      Dreams: This collection of some of her dreams provides more insight into her mental/emotional predicament.

6.      On the Impossibility of Her Life: Written in January of 2023 after returning to grad school for the Spring semester. I had to bring her home for a while soon after.

7.      Draft Letter to David Sylvian: She often thought of completing and sending this letter to David, the 70s rock star who changed her life, but she never did

8.      Discussion of Val’s Attachment Disorder with a Psychologist: From April 2024, several months after her death. I sent him some of her writings, including her notes for her psychotherapist from the spring of 2023. I described her to him. He agreed that she was a straightforward case and was surprised that she had survived to the age of 30. He helped me to better understand her and our predicament.

9.      Henry on Val’s Attachment Disorder: A letter that I wrote to a concerned friend in Aug. 2022

10.  Henry on Val’s Hopelessness: Written to a friend 10 days after her death

On Music

She listened to music much of the time, including when doing homework. It gave her a connection to other humans and elicited thoughts and feelings she could not otherwise have.

1.      On the band Tool: She explains why she loved their music so much. She was born at the right time, for the 1990s provided her with many bands that expressed anger, despair, and anxiety, thereby mirroring her emotions. She never liked sweet, melodic music. From a young age she listened to Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Korn, Rage Against the Machine, and Slipnot. She loved Einstürzende Neubauten for the complexity and novelty of their music. Because of them, she taught herself German. She could recognize songs in a second, and perfectly sing complex musical lines.

On the Female Problem

1.      The Basic Problem with Feminism: As part of Val’s attachment disorder, she never had normal human feelings, and especially female feelings. Her mentality defaulted to a masculine type. She hated being female. In some ways she was able to see her predicament, and that of all women, objectively. She saw human sexual dimorphism as no different from that of other animals. We have greater dimorphism than some species, less than others. For certain, human males and females are very different. She saw that, in order for women to sexually attract men, and to make, feed and raise babies, the Cosmos disadvantaged them in other ways relative to men 

2.      Proposed Book on the Female Problem and its Solution: She realized that feminism was no solution to the female problem. She wanted those women who were not content with their disadvantages to understand the true source of their discontent and to stop fruitlessly and counterproductively blaming men. The solution must begin with a full recognition of the problem and understanding of its causes. As solutions, she envisioned hormonal manipulation in utero and/or later in life (mostly higher testosterone levels), and eventually genetic engineering to allow females to be as physically strong and as courageous, inventive, task-oriented, and productive as men, yet still be able to produce and feed babies. We humans have decided to interfere with Nature in many ways, why not change ourselves? She collected and read many papers and books on this subject.

3.      Other Ideas on Feminism

4.      Quotes on Feminism and Male-Female Differences

5.      Angry Thoughts on Being a Woman: She wrote this a month before her death

Art

Drawing was her major pastime. It engaged her with this world, gave her intellectual pleasure, permitted her to make her fantasy world real, and expressed and relieved her emotional turmoil.

1.      Slide Show of Selected Drawings: After her Babesia infection, she lost the ability to draw effortlessly. Her brain function and connectivity were degraded. She became very frustrated with her drawings and despondent. Later, when the killing of nested parasites inflamed her brain, she could draw only occasionally and poorly. It was a severe loss for her.

2.      Triggered: The face expresses how she felt all the time. In the caption, she explains the purpose of her art. This is an example of art that helped to relieve her pain.

3.      Her Androgynous Fantasy Couple: They weren’t really lovers, as Valerie didn’t understand love as such. On the left is ND, an alien who came to Earth masquerading as a human. ND knows everything about the Cosmos intuitively, without language, and can form and shape matter by thought, including his/her own appearance. Hans (crouching on right) is a human who is a malformed female but identifies as male. Hans worked in a research facility with ND and figured out that ND must be an alien. Hans was sexually attracted to ND, but ND was unable to reciprocate. ND eventually gave Hans some her his/her special abilities—the kinds of abilities Valerie wanted to transform her own life. Both of her characters were self-inserts, expressing both her problems and aspirations. She had no insight into any of this until her “Husbando” revelation—when she fell in love with David Sylvian. Her fantasies about him allowed her to have normal human feelings for the first time in her life, and eventually allowed her to understand the nature and severity of her attachment disorder. When she was distraught, I could get her to cheer up a bit by asking her to talk about David or her alien fantasy characters.

Other Topics

1.      On the Cosmos and Our Purpose Here

Photos

1.      With Her Family in Lebanon in 2008: A picture taken at her mother’s school, Sophie Hagopian, in Bourj Hammoud just outside Beirut. She was anorexic at this time. Babesiosis induced an insane hunger that forced her to eat, even when full. By this time, she found that she could control the hunger by eating extremely small amounts of food. Later, starving herself no longer helped. When stressed the hunger would worsen and she would have to “stuff her face” almost continuously to not only satisfy the hunger but to be able to function and to sleep.

2.      Valerie’s Graduation in 2016: She needed high steroid doses to get through the end of the last semester. After she came home we stopped the steroids and she was left extremely fatigued.

3.      Receiving Plasmapheresis in October 2020: She was not able to tolerate any antibabesial treatment up to this time. Desperate to find something that could help her, we followed a neurologist’s advice and gave her a 5-day, high-dose corticosteroid treatment for presumed autoimmune encephalitis. When the steroids wore off she was left in a much worse state—unable to walk outside or even watch videos with us. She began needing to take very high steroid doses to eat, sleep and get out of bed. The neurologist prescribed plasmapheresis. While she was doubly immunosuppressed I started her on very strong antibabesial medications. We quickly killed a large number of the exposed parasites resulting in severe hemolysis, marked improvements, and a large decline in her steroid requirement.

4.      At the Camden Aquarium in March 2022: After 1.5 years of antibabesials and fibrinolytic enzymes she had improved enough that for the first time in 3 years she was able to make this trip with me to Philadelphia to visit the zoo and the Camden Aquarium. I cried with happiness as I watched her lean down to touch the stingrays. 

5.      With Dad at Luray Caverns and Choosing a Geode there in July 2022.

6.      With Dad in Philadelphia in July 2023: She was gradually becoming more functional with the clearing of Babesia parasites from her brain’s blood vessels using lumbrokinase and nattokinase. She was able to walk all over Center City for 2 days and attend museums. However, the stress and emotion of grad school in 2022-2023 had worsened her hunger and caused her to need high steroid doses for months, causing her face to become more Cushingoid and her belly more protuberant. She hated the effects of the steroids on her face and body immensely, but could not take less than she required. She became enraged whenever she saw herself in a mirror because it meant that she could never attract the androgynous young man she needed to fix her attachment disorder, and therefore had no chance to have a life she could tolerate.

7.      Val and I Taking a Walk in October of 2023: Just 1 month before her death. We took a walk together every day when she was able to do so, and talked continuously. She often complained to me about how there was no reasonable possibility of her ever having a life that she would want. She was proud of herself when she could avoid complaining to me, because she knew how much it hurt me. I argued against her conclusion because I could not bear to think of life without her, but in the end I believe she was right. I could not fix her attachment disorder, and no real person could. She was also so heavily infested with Babesia parasites (probably due to her pre-existing immunosuppressive Bartonella infection), and she needed such extremely high steroid doses to control her brain inflammation when she was dissolving Babesia nests and killing Babesia and Bartonella parasites, that she was essentially an untreatable case—one that only a desperate father-physician would have ever persisted to treat.

Let me know what you think.

hlindner1 at yahoo period com